A Cloud Guru Raises $33M to Scale Its Leading Online Cloud Training Platform

A Cloud Guru is teaching the world to cloud. Its state-of-the-art learning platform helps businesses and individuals rapidly develop cloud skills, prepare for certification exams, and progress through learning paths to become gurus in specialized disciplines.

Austin, TX — A Cloud Guru (“ACG”) today announced that it has closed a growth equity investment led by Summit Partners, alongside AirTree Ventures and existing investor Elephant. The company, a clear leader in online cloud computing training and talent development, will use the funding to accelerate hiring across the globe, expand its content library with specialized courses and labs taught by a growing roster of expert instructors and continue to build out features to help enterprises drive cloud adoption.

Founded in 2015 by brothers Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg, ACG is driven by a straightforward mission— to teach the world to cloud. What began as a single cloud certification course has expanded into a rich content library and hands-on labs covering Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms.

ACG has helped more than 850,000 users across 186 countries acquire the skills and certifications needed to pursue meaningful careers in the cloud. The state-of-the-art learning platform helps businesses and individuals rapidly develop cloud skills, prepare for certification exams, and progress through learning paths to become gurus in specialized disciplines.

“We are humbled by this level of support from our investment partners,” said Sam Kroonenburg, co-founder and CEO of A Cloud Guru. “We are eager to continue building our engineering, content, and go-to-market teams to support our customers and partners. We are now even better positioned to help more businesses and individuals learn to cloud.”

“Enterprise workloads continue to move to the cloud at an enormous pace, requiring a new set of IT skills to design, manage and secure applications,” said Tom Jennings, Managing Director at Summit Partners who has joined the company’s board of directors. “ACG’s platform uniquely enables organizations to develop their existing employees’ cloud skills and provide ongoing training to ensure continued aptitude in cloud architecture. And the results are impressive.”

In May 2018, A Cloud Guru launched ACG for Business, a learning management and talent development platform designed to provide businesses with a scalable, predictable path for building a highly-skilled cloud workforce. ACG’s Accelerator Program and Learning Paths enable enterprises to quickly onboard their teams to the cloud and provide professionals with a step-by-step path from beginner to expert across specific IT domains. ACG for Business helps enterprises meet and exceed their cloud ROI goals and is the cloud training platform of choice for companies including Dow Jones, Capital One DevExchange, and Qualcomm.

“It’s amazing to think how far we’ve come since those early days in 2015,” said co-founder Ryan Kroonenburg. “To all of the awesome Cloud Gurus who have supported us along the way, we want to say thank you. You are the reason we are where we are today. With this round of investment, we have additional resources to do even more in support of the A Cloud Guru community. Keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus.”

About A Cloud Guru
A Cloud Guru is the premier learning and talent development platform for cloud computing, delivering world-class courses by engineers, for engineers. Our state-of-the-art platform provides both businesses and individuals with the ability to stay current, stay relevant, and deliver results with cloud computing. To date, more than 850,000 students across 186 countries have taken our courses, labs, and quizzes. To learn how A Cloud Guru can accelerate your team’s adoption of cloud computing, please visit acloud.guru.

About Summit Partners
Founded in 1984, Summit Partners is a global alternative investment firm that is currently managing more than $19 billion in capital dedicated to growth equity, fixed income and public equity opportunities. Summit invests across growth sectors of the economy and has invested in more than 480 companies in technology, healthcare and other growth industries. These companies have completed more than 140 public equity offerings, and more than 190 have been acquired through strategic mergers and sales. Summit maintains offices in North America and Europe, and invests in companies around the world. For more information, please see www.summitpartners.com or on Twitter at @SummitPartners.

In the United States of America, Summit Partners operates as an SEC-registered investment advisor. In the United Kingdom, this document is issued by Summit Partners LLP, a firm authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Summit Partners LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales with registered number OC388179 and its registered office is at 11–12 St. James’s Square, London, SW1Y 4LB, UK. This document is intended solely to provide information regarding Summit Partners’ potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies.